Blog/News

Listening lately to lots of symphonies, mostly ones new to me. First stop for listening is YouTube. But if I find something that rings true and calls for more than one listen, I download it to my phone, go out for a walk with headphones on, and really listen. Hopefully, none of this will end up in my inadvertently getting run over in the street!

Recent good finds include the symphonies of Roy Harris and Alla Pavlova. The former was a great symphonist whose works do not deserve the oblivion into which they have fallen. It is baffling to me as to why that happened to Harris – but not to Copland, as an example. Perhaps, and this is just an unsupported theory, but to my ears his music rings of the plains of middle America – and that is a sound that simply no longer appeals in our currently divided country in which the hopefulness of the plains states has evaporated, having fallen prey to hysterical harpings of the right-wing extremists who have taken over these historically conservative bastions of the American body politic.

Politics aside, the music is simply grand. His way of gradually expanding and transforming his themes to tell a story is masterful and deserves careful listening. His voice is his own, but the unfolding of the music is similar to what I find so involving with another favorite symphonist, Sibelius, particularly in his later works.

The symphonies by Alla Pavlova, of which thus far I’ve only listened to several, demonstrate another great musical story teller at work. What I was especially delighted to hear, something I miss in some of the contemporary music I hear today, is unabashed emotion. It is music that tugs at your heart. It’s infrequent that I hear music that suddenly evokes a tear, but hers has its moments.

But, all that said, having listened to many symphonies which were entirely new to me, I then returned to symphonies which I know well, but hadn’t listened to anytime recently – and listened to several of the later symphonies by Shostakovich. They haven’t lost an iota of their power. Ranging, as he always does, from the sublime to the occasionally ridiculous, they are profound masterpieces to which few can compare. Everything that he does is masterful – the laying out of themes, great melodies, masterful counterpoint, exciting orchestrations.

The fact that I rarely sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch does have an upside. More listening time!

Slowly working my way through Grammy listening lists, the fact, which I already knew, that I am a musical outsider became steadily more apparent. I always enjoy voting during the 1st round, finding so many artists whose works were previously unknown to me creating albums that are unique, interesting and full of passion. Then, I get to the 2nd round, and discover that, with only a few exceptions, none of the albums I voted for in the 1st round made it to the nomination stage. This year, there were a number of categories in which I would normally cast a vote that I skipped entirely because I could not find a single one of the five nominations that struck me as worthy of the recognition of a Grammy award. Obviously, enough others thought they were worthwhile efforts – but there I was, scratching my head while listening, wondering what it could have been that impressed all the other voters. Proof once again, that my musical tastes run far from the mainstream.

When I first started composing, most other composers I met were still writing 12 tone music – something which has as little appeal to me now as it did back then. Then, minimalism became (and is still, to some extent) a rage – music which, if anything, I dislike even more than 12 tone music. Now, if the Grammy nominations are any indication, people have fallen for rhythmically driven music, often with repetitive riffs, that show (at least to my ear) little art.

The art of music is made up of distinct elements – melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, tonality, structure, timbre – and it is the artful combination of all of these that allow music to be such an extraordinarily rich vehicle for expressing emotions and telling a story that makes you want to share its journey. In different ways than serial or minimalist music do, much of the music I heard in this year’s nominations abandon one or another of those basic elements, resulting in a far less rich musical landscape. The music, at least to my ear, avoids rather than prompts expressions of deep emotion, thus falling into the realm of entertainment, rather than art. Whether or not I personally succeed at the art I strive for when writing music, is another matter, but the music I heard, with some exceptions, didn’t appear to me to even try to get there.

Having, over the past few weeks, gradually read my way through an edition of Handel’s keyboard music, music with which I was previously unfamiliar, I couldn’t help but make comparisons to Bach. For one thing, it struck me that Handel was far less skilled a contrapuntalist than Bach, relying more on harmonic progressions than on tightly knit counterpoint than Bach. In these keyboard pieces, he is also far less harmonically adventurous than Bach – he rarely modulates far afield from whence he started and often repeats (sometimes to a fault) the same simple tonal harmonic patterns. In the suites, while he has movements that are similarly titled to those in Bach suites – allemande, courante, gigue – they sound more English – especially in the movements that don’t have a dance title, but rather are simply called allegro or presto. As I played through the pieces, I was often more reminded of works that are in my copies of the Fitzwilliam Virginal books than of Bach or other Baroque composers of keyboard pieces. That is especially true of the several Chaconnes in the volume, two of which are in the same key as the Goldberg Variations and employ similar progressions to the opening 8 bars of Bach’s masterpiece – but then, like many English composers from an earlier generation, he repeats that same 8 bar phrase in a series of simplistic variations, often repeating couplets where one variation with quick notes in the right hand is followed by a similar one with the same pattern switched into the left.

Despite the above, which appears to criticize Handel’s writing, the music is nevertheless delightful to play. While playing I vaguely recalled reading that Beethoven, while having great respect for Bach, preferred Handel. Reading through these keyboard works, I could see why. Beethoven’s strengths (and weaknesses) were, to my mind, exemplified by the differences I found between Handel and Bach. Despite some extraordinary efforts at counterpoint, Beethoven’s strength, similar to this observation about Handel, was in harmonic progression. Somehow, Beethoven’s counterpoint never seems effortless – as does that of Bach. Somehow, I suspect Beethoven may have been envious of Bach’s extraordinary skill and felt more comfortable with Handel’s efforts. The several fugues by Handel in the collection I was reading were not, in my view, entirely successful. He rambles and seems unable to shape his fugal themes into an overall form that works effectively.

I suppose the greatest surprise for me was how I managed to have this volume in my music cabinet, for goodness knows how long, without ever pulling it out and reading it until this week.

At the risk of adding yet more words on a topic that has been endlessly debated for many years, a topic on which millions of words have already been written, after a solid week of listening to Grammy submissions and voting, I decided to jump into that debate. Listening to hundreds of entries, I came away more impressed than ever by the high quality of the many compositions by living composers that I heard. Music in a wide variety of styles. Some more, some less appealing to me personally, but so, so much excellent music.

In the relatively scant time frame that is available to listen your way through the thousands of submissions, I had to make choices. My choice was to give a listen and my careful consideration to artists who were recording new music, and to entirely skip any album that started with Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schumann, etc. There was simply so much wonderful new music to give my time to, that I couldn’t spend time with a performing artist who somehow believed that the 1,000th or 10,000th recording of some Beethoven piece contributed something of unique worth to the music world. So I kept on scrolling down as they went by on the screen, one after another, wondering all the while what on earth motivated the artists to expend all the time and effort to record and produce that particular album when there’s so much other wonderful new music getting little or scant attention. The only exception to this, was for recordings of unknown or lesser known composers from past centuries, many of whom were as creative and talented as those composers who now dominate the classical mainstream, but for whatever reason, have been forgotten by the world.

Which leads me to the contemporary classical concert scene and those endless debates I started out with. Will new music chase away audiences? Will audiences only attend concerts if music directors slip in new music, almost as if to disguise its presence on the program, in a program filled with the usual limited list of ever repeated standards? I well appreciate that I don’t represent the typical concert goer, but for sure, nothing will keep me away from a concert hall like an orchestra serving up another dish of Beethoven’s 5th or a pianist playing Chopin ballades. I’ve heard them so many times before and nothing those performers can do is likely to bring something new to that experience that would be worth my time or my money to go hear. But, a concert of great new music? Yes, I’m there.

Of course, others have and will argue that audiences HATE new music. Well, perhaps that’s less a commentary on new music than on the the music directors who create the programs, and, because of their own disinterest in contemporary music, don’t know the literature well enough to select wonderful, inspiring pieces to program. There’s certainly so much of that out there it’s hardly the fault of composers that music directors select music their audiences find boring, or worse, ugly. No one wants to go to a concert hall to hear ugly sounds. We can hear that while driving in traffic on the way to the theater. But there is so much gorgeous new music out there, it only takes the interest, desire and knowledge of the music of today to plan programs that audiences will rave about. That should be the standard fare – and if performers want to slip in the occasional warhorse, we can all slip out for an early intermission and return later for the main event, excited about being the first to hear something wonderful and new.